Dallas Area Rapid Transit had at least one of its 270 uniformed officers on every train Monday, a first for the agency.

“Effective today, there’s a uniformed presence on every single train we’re running,” DART Executive Director Gary Thomas told the Garland City Council on Monday night. “It’ll last as long as it needs to last. That’s our commitment to all of our customers and all of our stakeholders in the system.

The uniformed officers could be DART police, a fare enforcement officer or a security guard.

Garland, the third largest city that invests sales tax in DART, had requested an update in security changes and paying ridership at its City Council work session. A series of incidents, including a shooting and the death of a bystander at a light rail station in neighboring Richardson this month, prompted the inquiry.

“We stepped up our presence after January incidents,” Thomas explained. “That’s why an officer was present at Arapaho Station” on Feb. 7 when gunfire erupted.

Dallas police and the federal Transportation Security Administration offered to help the transit agency patrol its facilities after the fourth deadly incident since November at or near a DART station.

Thomas said there has also been a lot of emphasis on security at the West End station, DART’s busiest location, these last two weeks. There are four or five officers now stationed at West End and a handful of daily sweeps of the area, Thomas said.

DART officers issued significantly more citations for fare evasion in the past year, according to a year-end report on the transit agency’s police activities. More than 14,500 citations were issued for fare jumping in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, about 2,600 more than in the year before. (Read the report here:

Turns out that the northbound Red Line saw the most citations issued, including more than 800 tickets in July and August of this year, by far the busiest months among all the trains.

High Occupancy Vehicle lane citations — mostly to drivers who cheat by driving alone — actually went down, despite a short-lived enforcement push in August and September along U.S. 75. In August, police staged “saturation” operations to ticket violators, and issued 288 tickets. They issued 55 in September. In the other 10 months of the year, officers averaged just nine citations per month on Central.

“We were able to really do something in August, but we’ve had to back off because of budgetary reasons,” said Chief James Spiller of the DART police. Spiller said in an interview later that overtime costs had proven too high to sustain the enforcement along Central. However, Capt. C.F. Brathwaite said DART is working with the North Central Texas Council of Governments in hopes of securing funding from that body to increase enforcement soon.Continue reading →